JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism is the sequel to Gary Olson's prior collection of interviews, each originally published in JAC, with distinguished figures from the humanities and social sciences. Anyone working in composition or rhetoric should take the time to read both of these collections, since they help to define who we are and what we do in ways that perspectives from within our field simply cannot offer. For me, the most arresting moment in this second volume came almost exactly halfway through the book, during Olson's conversation with J. Hillis Miller. There Miller turns aside from a fairly routine defense of his career to a project somewhat different from the ones we might ordinarily associate with high theory. "I've been involved," Miller says with characteristic understatement, in the "translation of Western theory into Chinese for publication in the People's Republic of China. Although Tiananmen Square slowed us down a bit, the project hasn't, to my surprise, been stopped" (13 1). To my surprise, in the process of reading these words I felt myself over whelmed by emotions that other readers may also feel, even if they might not choose to vocalize their response exactly as I will here.

By invoking the events at Tiananmen, Miller clearly means to represent the export of high theory to the Chinese mainland as a blow struck for democracy, but what, I'd like to ask, might really be the consequence of this new trade in trendy Western ideas? I wonder if Miller is even vaguely aware of the role that English studies helped to lay eighty years ago in the waning of China's traditional way of life and its failure to create a democracy of the kind that the marchers at Tiananmen died-quite literally-trying to inaugurate. Not only did Western scientific knowledge arrive in China through the medium of books in English, but English became the lingua franca among the educated avant-garde. As Wen-Hsin Yeh documents in her brilliant account, The Alienated Academy, the teaching of English--and especially of composition--occupied a privileged place in the young Republic's progressive curriculum, a curriculum that found its most ardent adherents among the rising urban bourgeoisie (14). As the last century has taught us to expect, however, the arrival of our sciences and humanities ignited a ferocious "culture war" pitting Qing traditionalists like Zhang Taiyan against humanist reformers like Hu Shi (25). And as history has also taught us to expect, the traditionalists eventually fell before the onslaught of modernity. China, the "old China," would never be the same. Yet the story that Yeh tells is far from a happy one, because the knowledge that arrived along with English studies was powerful enough to deconstruct the old order but powerless to raise up a new one. The modernization of learning produced a "knowledge class" increasingly demoralized but aggressively self-promoting--so demoralized and so self-promoting that no one was finally willing to make much of a case for something as optimistic and humane as a democratic polity. Far more persuasive for young Chinese men and women overcome by anomie was the totalizing program of the Communist left, which had nothing but contempt for "bourgeois" liberalism with its defense of ideals like dialogue, pluralism, and human rights. As Yeh argues, the "polarization between cultural and political values, between individual worth and collective goals" had reached "breaking point" by the end of the l930s: "Subsequent Chinese history was to show the ultimate tragedy, that those who sought to infuse their lives with meaning through action ... had to sacrifice the one to choose the other" (278).

If the events leading up to Tiananmen show anything, they show that large numbers of mainland Chinese today have learned--in the most painful way conceivable, with ten to twenty million people killed directly by the state--that the lessons of liberalism may sound, after all, less hollow than they formerly seemed. And in spite of my own misgivings about the liberal tradition, which does not seem to me pluralistic enough, I can scarcely imagine the coming of high theory to China without a sense of genuine terror. For now it appears that the past might indeed repeat itself, not as farce but as another forty years of tragedy. And this possibility obliges me to ask about the consequences of high theory here at home. What does it mean, for example, when the American academy's finest minds-whom I would also count among our most pampered and protected citizens-have made their reputations by attacking liberalism as faint-hearted and mealy-mouthed, "a brief against belief and conviction," in the words of another JAC interviewee (57). This particular interviewed was Stanley Fish, who makes the same argument at greater length in his recent book, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech. According to Fish, the institutions of the modern liberal state-the government, the courts, the academy--try to adjudicate impartially among conflicting social interests. But because impartiality is a fiction that no one really believes, as Fish never tires of announcing, the conflicts rage on behind the scenes when they ought to unfold in plain view. Yet at the same time that Fish trashes liberalism for the sake of "belief and conviction," he defines these two terms in a manner that some readers may find incompatible with "belief" of any sort. Fish himself virtually concedes as much:

And just in case we might have misread him, Fish underscores his position at the close of the interview: "Hearkening to me, from my point of view, is supposed to lead to nothing" (67). Fish might say that instead of concerning ourselves with something as fugitive and burdensome as truth, we ought to be concerned with finding arguments light enough to make other people do what we want them to. And this is just what we always do anyway, or so Fish hopes to persuade us.

When people speak about Stanley Fish nowadays, they often use the term "pragmatism," but it would be well worth comparing Fish's version of that tradition to the pragmatism of, say, Emerson, which begins as a special form of idealism. Emerson wrote, for example, about his experience of "divine moments." As he confesses in the essay "Circles," "I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when [the] waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon the time" (176). While renouncing the belief in any fixed expression of truth, and while locating truth itself firmly within private conscience, Emerson still saw the need for a point of reference well beyond the localist's horizon--well beyond the self and community. Emerson may have felt "Deity" in his "heart," but he managed to preserve a crucial sense of his limitations. "I am a dwarf," he wrote, "I [will] remain a dwarf" (209). And he says so because he foresaw that without a strong awareness of something more, something else--always beyond the world that he could see and could feel--his pragmatic way of thinking would eventually become an exercise in the "aggression" that Fish now represents as the sine qua non of social life (57). Speaking as someone who has watched Fish reduce entire rooms full of well-mannered auditors into a dissatisfied silence, I find it telling that the highest complement he can pay to Derrida is to describe him as a "man" of "extraordinary power of intelligence" (emphasis added 52).

Fish's "pragmatism" is not the philosophy of Emerson or Peirce, James or Dewey; it is the Realpolitik of the junta--a celebration of what Jasper Neel once approvingly called "the strongest voice." And to people working in a "'subaltern" field like composition/rhetoric, this celebration of strength and success may look like just the thing for us. In her response to Fish, for example, Patricia Bizzell candidly admits, "Where Fish's thinking most influences me is precisely in his articulation of the powers of rhetoric" (emphasis added 69). And John Trimbur is scarcely less impressed by Fish's claim that it's all "a matter of rhetoric" (77). Yet I cannot read Trimbur's happy summation of the Fishian anti-credo without recalling a man whose fate I learned about ten years ago from a longtime friend, an art historian just back from western China. This man was the abbot of the Ganden Monastery in Tibet once the world's third largest monastic institution, and in 1968, when the Red Guards had reduced Ganden to a rubble after castrating all the monks they could find, the abbot was hung up by his arms for a number of years. When my friend met him in 1981, he had been released on the instructions of a truly noble man, the reformer Hu Yao Bang, but the first thing that the abbot, by then permanently deformed, tried to do as soon as they took him down was to organize the rebuilding of his ruined "paradise." Predictably enough, two years later, prior to Hu's own fall from power, the Chinese government officially closed Tibet and put the abbot to death. I suppose that it suffices to say, as Trimbur does, that culture is basically a Gramscian "war of positions" (76), but I hardly think that this precept will help us decide, when the moment of crisis comes, which "position" we will each choose to occupy--dangling from the end of a chain or else hoisting some poor devil up.

Before we can imagine what our Western "theory" might do to liberalizing China--where our much-deconstructed fiction of the self may someday end the use of torture--we might ask what it does for, or possibly to, us here. Could it be that theory as practiced by people like Miller and Fish perpetuates the inequalities it purports to "interrogate's and "deconstruct"? Surely it is no accident that at the very moment when English studies arrived in Republican China, an American sociologist named Robert Park observed that urbanization and the growth of industry were undermining our society's own "primary" institutions--the family, the neighborhood, the democratic town meeting. Park also recognized, however, that just as those institutions were quickly falling apart, "secondary institutions were rising up to take their place--the state, the schools, the professions, and the leaders of industry, with their corrosive culture of 'efficiency... (593-600). But replace them the new institutions did, and the sad result is the administered society we live in today. If the beneficiaries of this society--among them Miller and Fish, Bizzell, Trimbur, and myself--are increasingly fond of declaring everything to be a matter of rhetoric, they can do so precisely because the liberal state holds everyone securely in the proper place. Academic intellectuals can change their philosophies from week to week like so many pretty shirts, and they are free to proclaim from the rooftops the most "unruly" of unruly things, but nothing they proclaim ever changes the relation between "experts" and their "lay" clientele. "Ireland shall get her freedom," William Butler Yeats once wrote, "and you still break stones"--and this holds even truer for stone- breakers here so long as the division of cultural labor survives. But what might happen if we tried to get rid of it? Have Fish and Miller found the best way out? In the absence of the modern liberal state, what might be the social consequences of an ideology that celebrates aggression as the inescapable response to difference? I have a nagging suspicion that it will simply mean more chains and more people dangling from them.

The voices we most need to hear in Philosophy are not the most "powerful" voices but the ones that question the violence--the cult of power--so important to the practice of high theory itself. Perhaps none of the collection's contributors exposes the nature of that violence more lucidly than Jasper Neel in his response to Hillis Miller. There Neel recalls his early attempts to learn the mysteries of deconstruction during a summer under Miller's close direction. Yet no matter how long Neel struggled to get it right, thereal nature of deconstruction always seemed just beyond his reach:

What is deconstruction, ultimately? It's whatever the "reigning gurus" say it is. In the economy of knowledge we call "the humanities," luminaries like Miller maintain their prestige and power by ceaselessly refashioning "culture" itself. 'Me point that Miller takes particular care to keep hidden, though-and the same might be said of Stanley Fish-is that this top-down arrangement does not constitute a challenge to the modern liberal state, but depends upon it absolutely. Just as legislators putatively represent us in the political sphere, so men and women like Miller, more or less explicitly, claim to "represent" us in the domain of culture. But culture simply doesn't work that way. No matter how the currents of high theory may twist and turn, there is one thing we all can be certain of-that what holds true for God and man at Yale, or for I'homme et le bon Dieu at the Ecole des hautes etudes, will prove false and flatly useless in venues like Newark, New Jersey and Nashville, Tennessee. If culture is "situational,” as Stanley Fish likes to claim, then no one can make culture for anybody else. And if that's true, then the academy is ripe for a change immensely greater than the one that Miller foresees "optimistically," since the change that he imagines-a shift from belles lettres to culture generally, and from the old canon to a new and more expansive one-is sociologically no change at all.

A real change, a redistribution of the power to make and unmake knowledge, may never come to pass, not least because the members of the knowledge class--defenders of tradition like the late Allan Bloom and deconstructors like the lively Judith Butler--have reasons to preserve things much as they are. For every Jasper Neel, whose thinking has changed more than I would have ever predicted, there are twenty recent Ph.D.s with a taste of blood in their mouths--men and women who lie in their beds and dream of someday getting to call the cultural tune. And precisely because we keep dancing to somebody's call, I am all the more astonished and gratified to hear other, softer voices in Philosophy, the voices, for example, of Donald Davidson, bell hooks, and Stephen Toulmin. These voices tell us in a variety of ways that the current regime is susceptible to change, that something like a cultural democracy does not lie altogether beyond the realm of the possible. What would happen, for example, if people working in English studies took Donald Davidson at his word?:

English departments began around the turn of the previous century with the effort to control the consumption of textual knowledge, initially by appeal to taste, somewhat later by appeal to talent and tradition, and most recently by appeal to the law like conventions that go by the name of theory. And yet, far from setting people free from the force of habit, the various critical approaches have proven even more minutely controlling than the New Criticism at its reductionist worst. What would happen to the English apparatus, though, if we said, as Davidson seems quite willing to say, that people should read "in whatever way they most enjoy" because there simply "isn't one correct way" (26). And what would happen, when we encountered radically different ways of reading, if we acted on a "Principle of charity" presupposing that every way of reading will make sense if we only try to understand the reader's point of view?

Accepting that, we shall have entered a radically different professional world, one in which our principal concern will no longer be the quality of the readings that people produce--who really cares if anyone "gets" Paradise Lost?--but the quality of the individual lives from which those readings arise. And then we might be willing to agree with bell hooks that a tradition of inquiry like feminism, which has grown progressively distanced from the problems of many women in its climb toward academic prominence, must not remain divorced from prosaic concerns like "the growing illiteracy" of the “poor" (96).  When the focus of our attention shifts from knowledge for its own sake--in other words, from high theory--to human consequences of knowledge, then we might at last see why it could be true, as Jane Tompkins alleges during her interview, that "some of the happiest places to work" in English studies today have "virtually no professional visibility" (175).  If knowledge lacks both a meaning and a truthfulness when we divorce it from our immediate needs and fears, then a highly visible project like Miller's version of deconstruction--which smugly erases human beings from the scene of their own experience--stands revealed as another learned sleight of hand: rigidifying our relations to the world when we always have the where-withal to refashion them "on a daily basis," just as Tompkins believes.

Jane Tompkins, I know, is a narcissist who has damned composition and rhetoric with her faint, lazy-minded praise. bell hooks also goes a long way toward discrediting herself when she describes her students, like so many tiny fishes jostling for food, competing for her boundless love. And Donald Davidson is, just as David Bleich alleges in his "Afterword," guilty of suppressing the complexity of life as actually lived for the sake of philosophical tidiness (244). While esteeming the achievement of all three writers as I do, I will readily admit that they continue to valorize an abstract, godlike certainty at odds with their own explicitly anti-idealist claims. They remain, in other words, enchanted by the false allure of high theory itself, the best cure for which may turn out to be Stephen Toulmin's worldly-wise advice in the final interview of Philosophy:

Toulmin, I am sure, has limitations of his own, but for me this insight brings to an appropriate close not simply the book but the entire ideology of the "modern age," if we mean by that term the historical moment when the best and the brightest sought to impose a single rationality on every area of human life. Alone of all the interviewees, Toulmin appears to have understood "on his pulses," so to speak, that a change of ideas or a change of words-the first and last hope of high theory today-ends by leaving everything except words the same. What has to undergo a fundamental change, instead, are forms of life at their most ordinary: the operation of bodily practices and felt attitudes below the level of words and signs. But even Toulmin's call for a return to the town may not go far enough in this direction if he means the town as a metaphor for the social constructionists' "community"-a tyranny of the collective. If cultural democracy is what we want, then everybody always has to have the means to speak and act differently. A person like Toulmin must be able to do what will surely trouble many of his most politicized readers-declining to board the very best of bandwagons and refusing not only to answer but even to read his many able critics (219). Toulmin, in other words, must be able to say "no," because without this most basic of freedoms he would have no freedom at all.